I met a philosophy professor the other day. Well, actually I see him a few times a week. He frequents the same coffee shop I do.

Peter believed Jesus’ kingdom on earth would need swords and men willing to use them. It would require sacrifice, the willingness to die for Jesus, and also, the willingness to kill for Jesus…

Long ago, I made Jesus, sovereign love, my hermeneutic, my “methodology of interpretation,” (6) the lens through which my entire theology is defined.

              I am not the systematic theologian with letters in front of his name. I am a relational theologian; a son, a husband, a father, a brother, a friend – I am loved and I love. I’m not interested in debate but I aspire to...

I’ve often described how leading A Family Story these past years has felt much like exploring the best route up a mountain while people are following you.

It’s been an exhilarating adventure filled with joy, breakthrough, and revelation. It’s also had its share of wrong turns and backtracking.

It can be a challenge to cast vision while backtracking. But there has been nothing more transformational than the goodness of God we’ve discovered through pioneering!

If I type into Google’s search bar, “If God is good…” Google will finish my search with the following suggestions: …Why is there suffering? …why do bad things happen? …why is there evil?

Jesus is my lens, my true narrative. His perfect love is my conviction. His goodness is my faith. Every question I have, every relationship or circumstance, every scripture, including the tension Job represents, is measured against the measureless revelation of Jesus.

I held my tongue while the men provided their own scripture, “…women should be silent in the churches…for they are not permitted to speak, but should remain silent and subordinate” (1 Cor 14:34), and “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Tim 2:12). The Elders believed that because their thoughts were biblical, they were somehow true. But of course, they were not. Jesus was far from them…

When it came to a particular chapter in Prone To Love, one of my pastor friends raised an alarm regarding my thoughts about the sovereignty of God. I had written an entire chapter under the title, “God Is Not In Control” and that thought bothered him. He felt it was an incredibly flawed idea. He was also concerned it would cause distress and confusion in my reader. He suggested that promoting the idea that God is not in control would be the equivalent of “pulling the string that unravels the universe.”

        This is an excerpt taken from, Prone To Love There were two trees in the garden of Eden. Well, there were probably thousands of trees in the garden, but there were two particular trees God went out of His way to acknowledge. First, the tree...

A true dream, one that is birthed in the heart of “old men dreamers,” carries with it authority and power. Only a person who has experienced the death of vision, who has nailed vision to the cross, has access to the power of resurrection. When he dreams again, he dreams the dreams of heaven. And a dream that’s birthed in heaven has power to transform earth, it can change a family, a neighborhood, a city, a nation, it grows exponentially and has eternal significance.

The power of the song “Come Thou Fount” is the revelation that we can always know His Love

And when the valley of the shadow of death is upon us, that’s when we must know to our core that our Fathers nature doesn’t change. God isn’t fickle. He hasn’t gotten tired of us or changed His mind about us. He hasn’t turned His heart from us; He’s not judging us or condemning us. He is still the same always-good Love He has always been.

I don’t believe in hell as a place of eternal torment and punishment. I don’t believe in punishment. I do believe hell exists after this life because I believe God is love and love requires that we are free to choose…

Jesus never once was “prone to wander” or “prone to leave the God He loved.” He came to earth to settle that exact issue once and for all. He came to set us free that we too might see, encounter, and become love; that we might be transformed from prone to wander to prone to love Him!

Control, it masquerades in the religious rhetoric of holiness; its wars are holy, its politics, its inquisitions, its crusades, its genocide, its prejudice, discrimination, racism, sexism, its abuse – all painted with the brush of fanatic righteousness.